Breeding a better bread

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00][music] >> These are new varieties. This is a buckwheat. This is David Pogue.

[00:00:08]Washington State University Professor Kevin Murphy is trying to fix bread.

[00:00:14]Bread's been baked for many, many thousands of years, but the last 100 years we've lost a lot of the nutrition and flavor, and that's what we're trying to bring back. He's the director of the university's bread lab, whose mission is to breed better grain to make better bread.

[00:00:31]We're not eating whole grain breads anymore. All these micronutrients that our body needs is in the outer layer, the skin of the wheat.

[00:00:40]>> And you're saying we typically throw that away? Well, yeah, it's removed from the wheat flour.

[00:00:46]>> Why? It can lend the flour to go rancid after maybe 4 to 6 months, whereas just white flour, once the bran and germ is removed, can be stored indefinitely for a very long time. Is this a true statement that most adults prefer the taste of white bread to wheat bread at the moment? Yes.

[00:01:06]Okay, but you're trying to fix that.

[00:01:09]>> Yes, through careful breeding for flavor.

[00:01:12]No genetic engineering is involved, just careful crossbreeding of thousands of varieties. What we're looking at is a breeding nursery of about 300 different varieties and breeding lines here. Oh, like batch, batch, batch, batch.

[00:01:26]>> Exactly. Breeding the perfect wheat is a tall order. So, the ideal wheat would have a good yield Yes.

[00:01:34]>> bushels bushels per acre, disease resistant, bug resistant, heat resistant, drought resistant, higher nutritional value, and better tasting.

[00:01:44]Yeah. See? Is that everything?

[00:01:45]>> You're a plant breeder already. I'm kind of stretching it. The Bread Lab's Janine Sanguins What do you want on your pizza, David? baked us some amazing 100% whole wheat pizza. So, if it's better for you, why isn't it a thing? Because people think it tastes like cardboard.

[00:02:00]Typically.

[00:02:01]>> A way to sell it, Janine. I people think, not this person. Are there climate benefits?

[00:02:07]Yes. We are losing 30% of our food.

[00:02:11]30% of the kernel is thrown away and not used for human nutrition when we use sifted white flour. What if a certain percent of that 30% that you don't need to grow wheat on anymore can be wetlands again or can be just more diversity of different crops being grown?

[00:02:27]Bread Lab is also breeding wheat to withstand the more extreme growing conditions in our hotter, drier, floodier climate era. To give the farmers the capacity to buffer changes in the environment.

[00:02:41]Thanks to $19 million in new grants, you'll soon see more bread that's good for flavor, good for you, and good for the planet. What can we do as plant breeders that can be really impactful either for nutrition or climate? It sounds like what you're saying is that we're doing it because we wish people well. Yeah.

[00:03:03]And we love doing it.